Why Employees Quit: The Work Quests We Really Want

What was the real reason you took your last job, or left your last role?

Last night, I read an analysis in Harvard Business Review, "Why Employees Quit," by Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta. This article distills insights from 1,000+ job switches across 15 years. While many of their findings resonated with me, I found this one to be particularly true: People change jobs not for paychecks but for progress. We’re driven by the quests we undertake in our work.

In the piece, the authors identify four reasons why people change jobs: “to get out of their current situation, to regain control of their work or lives, regain alignment between their work and their knowledge and capabilities, or take the next step in their careers." They also indicate that understanding the interplay of the factors that “push” you out of one job vs. the factors that “pull” you into another is essential. 

I’ve become acutely aware of how these factors impact my own work-related decisions. In my 15-year career, I’ve made several job changes that cut my earnings significantly—moves that might seem odd in our capitalist, paycheck-driven culture, but were essential to my own quest for purpose. And in each role I’ve had (whether fractional or full-time), there are elements that push me out (like a project running its course or interpersonal challenges) and those that pull me in (like curiosity, alignment with my mission, or opportunities to increase impact).

Reacting solely to “push” factors can lead to hasty moves or “rebound jobs.” Instead, the HBR authors encourage us to consider the subtle cues that pull us toward meaningful work.

While I may not have thousands of job-seeker stories under my belt, I regularly speak with 3-5 “job switchers” each week, from entry-level to executive. Just this week, I had a conversation with a high school senior aspiring to reduce her generation’s dependence on social media, a nonprofit executive seeking the right role after an interim position, and someone on the verge of accepting a job offer, weighing the work-life balance it would demand.

What I’m noticing is a shift: People are moving away from singular career paths or traditional ladders. They’re searching for something that feels more complete, that makes them feel whole and authentically connected to themselves. But they don’t know where to start.

These are really hard questions to suss out with people in your network, largely because our current job structures aren’t well-established to help us explore those quiet, uncertain moments of personal discovery. 

What we get instead is a lot of conflicting advice that’s slightly skewed or biased based on who we speak with about it. Here are some examples:

The Well-Intentioned (but Biased) Career Advice We Tend to Get From our Networks:

• Managers: Since a team member’s departure increases the workload for those who remain, managers often have a vested interest in keeping you where you are, which can skew their guidance.

• Recruiters: While recruiters are invaluable in connecting us to opportunities, they’re incentivized by the speed of placements rather than by sitting with us to deeply understand our unique career aspirations.

• Potential Hiring Managers: A new hiring manager is focused on convincing you to join their team. They may unintentionally frame advice in a way that aligns with their priorities, not necessarily with what’s best for you.

• Friends: Friends provide emotional support, but without first hand experience in your particular domain or field, they may struggle to offer relevant guidance on your motivations.

• Parents: Family members can be supportive but may also project their own career anxieties. For example, my mom’s desire for me to have a stable, full-time job sometimes makes it hard for her to understand my affinity for fractional project-hopping.

Too often, navigating career decisions feels muddled by the hidden agendas and personal motivations of those around us, making it difficult to get truly objective guidance.

So how do you discover your real work quest? 

After years of fractional work, I realized in May that I was leveling up on projects in one industry but feeling a discordance of being drawn somewhere else. In HBR terms, perhaps I felt “pushed” out of some of my work in crypto, and the “pull” from industry peers no longer felt as aligned with my personal mission. So, I made a decision: I would only pursue work that felt deeply aligned with my purpose. I quit all jobs that were not in direct pursuit of that directive. I wanted to see what I would do, naturally, if just simply left to my own devices. (Easier said than done with a husband, two kids, and many fractional jobs to boot.)

But miraculously, this summer, the stars aligned and I somehow found myself with two weeks of NYC living entirely by myself—the first time in five years. I decided to use that unprecedented window of opportunity to lead myself through an intense, week-long exercise in unpacking my personal mission. The approach was intricate, deeply personal, and surprisingly simple: I surrounded myself only with things that bring me quiet, steady energy. Plants. Books. Exploring NYC. Intentional relaxation.

To amplify this sense of calm, I took no chances. I attended three yoga classes, one massage, a day at the salon, and even booked a rooftop pool day (my first ever). I pulled three novels from the shelf that had been gathering dust, carrying one with me everywhere. I minimized my contact with others and spent nights sequestered in my tiny shoebox office on Park Avenue or up until the wee hours in my apartment, surrounded by Chinese food boxes and Taylor Swift music. The first half of the week was dedicated solely to reading, unwinding, and observing the quiet thoughts that surfaced. I noted what I gravitated toward when no one else was around to influence me. Each time something sparked, I captured it—like catching ideas in a dreamcatcher—and wrote it down.

As the week wore on, I found that I quite literally could not turn off certain parts of my personality, even during my “forced relaxation” mode. These were: Writing about the way we work, learning about community, and experimenting with AI. (In case you’re playing along at home, this was also the week I wrote an entire ebook with AI on fractional work, an unprecedented level of productivity, even for me.)

In an unexpected turn, I ended up with a bonus week of solo time. That second week, I expanded on the ebook, transforming it into a course and a platform, and even gave an impromptu speech at a conference I hadn’t planned to attend, sharing how AI could reshape the future of teaching and learning. I capped it all off with a block party at Comp Sci High’s new building. Those 14 days felt like an out of body experience for me. But in the end, I got exactly what I needed to, which was realizing this: In the absence of structure, expectations, or assignments, this is my work—helping people use technology to elevate the way we learn, work, and connect.

It’s certainly not possible nor tenable for everyone to take a two-week work bender like I did. I feel lucky to have had that opportunity. But also, the playbook that worked for me will not be the playbook that works for you. The way in which we each identify our chosen path is different for each of us. Which is what makes it so tricky to suss out.

In the HBR article, the authors also present some ideas for how managers in any job context can begin to tease out these subtle desires from their current colleagues. While I think this would be nice in theory, I think it overlooks the underlying tension of conflicting interpersonal dynamics in a work context. After all, you can only have an open and candid conversation with your manager about what you want to do in your life if you trust them with those scary, unfinished thoughts, before you’re ready to share them with anyone else.

While these conversations are a good start, what we really need is for a normalization of a few key work trends:

1. Normalize Fractional Quitting: I’ve written about this before, but I’d like to see more people leaders encourage people with one foot out the door to actually take a step outside of the building somewhere else. My guess is, given the chance to go “off leash” on a new project, you’d end up retaining at least 30% of of those people full-time after a brief stint or sabbatical somewhere else. As an added benefit, they would “come home” with a rejuvenated sense of purpose, some extracurricular peers, so-to-speak, and an added layer of knowledge to bring back to your organization. For those who don’t return, a fractional quit also buys you time to find and hire up a replacement alongside the outgoing person, which would minimize disruptions and lost institutional memory.

2. Encourage Skill-Building Side Quests: Rather than quit fully, I’d love to see employers actively encourage motivated but “stuck” employees to take on a learning journey outside of their current work environment. My most exhilarating professional moments over the past two years have been periods in the frantic haze of learning something brand new with a group, whether this was crypto community-building best practices, crypto foundation grant strategies, or my work now, in practical AI applications. Imagine if employers actively encouraged and paid for these learning journeys. (Noting however that this would only work with the trust and autonomy from an employer to let these learning journeys be entirely employee-selected, and without judgment.)

3. Promote Job Swaps or Baton Passes: Hear me out on this one. Have you ever met someone and thought, “Damn. They would be so good at doing my job?” What if we leaned into that energy and we built employment systems that actively encouraged people to more readily and intentionally find and train their replacements? In one company that I worked for in a fractional capacity, I realized that I was not actually the person they needed in that role, but I was able to identify and help them hire someone who was. That ability–to effectively knowledge transfer and seek a replacement–is more valuable than ever in our fast-changing world of work for knowledge workers.

These are just some of my ideas for how I’d like to see the world of work evolve as we each individually pursue more intentionality around our work quests. I am so thankful that HBR published this intense study, and I can’t wait to see what else it inspires among employers today.